


Life and Light

by hellkitty



Series: Waylaid [1]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Other, Tentacles, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-11
Updated: 2013-02-11
Packaged: 2017-11-28 23:35:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/680150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Continuation of Waylaid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life and Light

  
for [](http://tf-speedwriting.livejournal.com/profile)[**tf_speedwriting**](http://tf-speedwriting.livejournal.com/) prompt to take something you've written and write a continuation.  Continues [Waylaid](454043).

It held the white and red jet as he recharged, little tendrils of light connecting the mech to it in an intricate, fine network, the little beams—particle and wave, substance and nonsubstance, sliding into Wing’s systems, taking in everything it could: history, emotion, design, memory.  It felt, through Wing, the miracle of flight, the fear of escape, the swelling of courage, the sliding, embodied grace of moving  wielding a blade.  It lived, in short, through Wing’s life, taking in every detail it could, absorbing Wing’s being.

It did not consider what it did anything but sating curiosity. It did no harm—it did not damage any of the networks it probed, merely riding along them, copying and extracting: an act of flattery, really, wanting to know Wing as much as it could, keeping the jet complacent, in a torpor of pleasure, sending rounded swells of matter into the jet’s idle valve, a tendril licking slowly around the spike. Not enough to bring a climax, but enough to keep that haze of desire, that languorous openness.

It did not think in terms of right and wrong: all the data it had accrued in its long, long life had told it that right and wrong were slippery things, too often dependent on perspective or harder to parse factors.  It thought instead in terms of intimacy, of wanting to know what it was like to be truly alive, as these embodied things were.

It had spent its entire life in the core of a ship, unable to move, only wanting to learn and know.  It had seen, through the ship, hundreds of worlds, and inside the ship’s communications, in the laboratories and cells, it had seen thousands of acts of cruelty.

But it had never _felt_. It had never had access, direct and clear, to emotions, and the Cybertronian’s programming was set in a format it could understand—protocols that linked history and the present, identity and thought. 

Wing was a unique experience for it, clean and pure, like a flawless zircon.

And through Wing, it felt, for the first time, wrongness. It felt the value and the joy of life, and the pain of abusing that.  It felt pleasure for the first time, and the reverse of that bright coin—the loss of pleasure, pain and loss.

It had feelings—all too new—when Wing finally stirred and it knew it had to release him.  And it did, with a newly-legged regret, even as it hoarded the jet’s memories and life in its data storage.  It felt something another might call love—that desperate yearning, that emotion of seeing everything about another, accepting all and wanting more.

~Return~ it pushed, with one last light tendril, caressing down Wing’s arm as Wing balanced along the service ledge.  There was color and texture of longing in the not-word, in the sensation of incompletion.

“Yes,” Wing said, his own voice an answering trill, that seemed to fill the bright white of the chamber.  It felt all the cilia along its length reach to capture the sound, fold it into its being, one last piece of data.

[***]

And it waited, time passing with its usual slowness, isolated and alone. And it watched the slavers on the ship, and felt their cruelty with new sense organs, shrinking back, hoping for Wing, feeling darkness and wanting to be shown light. 

It waited, and learned fear and hate, the darknesses that made beauty and joy shine brighter.  And it felt…lonely, achingly so, clinging to the data like a treasure. 

Until it heard the thing it hadn’t even conceived of: new data, new emotions. Wing, dead. Wing, killed by Braid, the surviving slavers crowing over the deed, like it was some victory.

It shrank, in its chamber, tentacles twisting upon themselves, writhing in this new pain: loss, hope destroyed, the thing it wanted most in the world snatched away. Never again, that beautiful smile. Never again, those exquisite emotions. Never again, that beautiful release, the metal body and offering to it, untold, untellable wonders.

It felt anger and hate, heat hotter than any star it had sailed, and shriveled away, like something blackening, charring, a limb or two yielding to those and erupting into darkness. A silvery powder filtered through the chamber, a snow of grief and it could not help but think that Wing might find it beautiful.

~Yes~ it thought, an echo of sound, capturing Wing’s voice, or trying to.  It had everything, it realized: Wing’s memories. Wing’s design. Wing’s emotions. All it needed was a body, a frame. It could.

It could.

And that night, in the darkest hour when the rest of the slavers had drunk themselves to sleep, licking their wounds, when the captives in their cells succumbed to the darkest hours of grief, it reached out, with the power with which it controlled the ship, and turned on the fabricators.  While the ship wrapped itself in darkness, physical, mental, spiritual, it created light.


End file.
